Vladimir Nabokov dictates from note cards while his wife, Véra, types in Ithaca, N.Y., in 1958.

Vladimir Nabokov dictates from note cards while his wife, Véra, types in Ithaca, N.Y., in 1958.

Photo: Carl Mydans/The LIFE Picture Col

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‘Letters to Véra,’ by Vladimir Nabokov

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Mary Shelley, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Sylvia Plath were not only remarkable authors; they were also married to remarkable authors. But Véra Nabokov, the worthy subject of Stacy Schiff’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1999 biography, was a different sort of literary spouse, one who sublimated her own creative energies into serving as secretary, driver, agent, editor and translator to her brilliant husband, Vladimir.

She was also his protector, who, in addition to packing a small pistol, zealously guarded the couple’s privacy. Véra destroyed all the letters she wrote to Vladimir. The letters that he wrote to her are being published now, 24 years after Véra’s death and three years after the death of their son, Dmitri.

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Véra Slonim, a Russian Jewish emigree, met Vladimir at a charity ball in Berlin in 1923 when she was 19 and he 22. She admired the work he had been publishing under the nom de plume Sirin and, wearing a mask, confronted him and recited one of his poems from memory. Vladimir, who had recently been rejected by another woman, was soon smitten and writing new poems to Véra.

They married in 1925, and, until Vladimir’s death in 1991, she was the muse to whom he dedicated every one of his books. Almost every one of the letters to Véra includes an effusion of ardor of the sort that Nabokov mocks when fatuous, infatuated Charlotte Haze writes to Humbert Humbert. “Oh, my love, my sweet, my dear one,” is the way that Vladimir addresses “My little Tuftikins” in a letter dated June 10, 1926.

The couple’s devotion to each other is tested only in 1937, when Vladimir has an affair with Irina Guadanini, another Russian emigree. Véra was in Berlin while Vladimir was in France, but she must have gotten wind of her husband’s infidelity, because Vladimir’s letters to her deny any wrongdoing and urge her to join him in Paris.

She is apparently reluctant to inhabit the same country as Guadanini, since Vladimir keeps imploring her to get out of Nazi Berlin, “a city of misfortunes and mishaps” and join him in Paris. He expresses impatience over her insistence on alternate destinations such as Czechoslovakia, Belgium and Italy. Forced to choose between the two, Vladimir drops Guadanini and resumes his uxorious letters to Véra. The last dated one was sent on April 7, 1976.

Most of the letters were composed in the 1920s and 1930s, for stretches almost daily. Distance not only made the heart grow fonder, but it also encouraged epistolary exchanges. When Vladimir was visiting his family in Prague or giving readings and hustling for a job in Western Europe, and Véra was taking the cure at a sanatorium in the Black Forest, the only way the couple could communicate was through letters. If e-mail, cell phones, or text messaging had been available, the relationship between Vladimir and Véra might have developed quite differently.

Later, during their years in America and Switzerland, when husband and wife were rarely apart from each other, there are very few letters. Because Vladimir and Véra turned to English only after moving to the United States, almost all the letters were in Russian. Olga Voronina and Brian Boyd do a conscientious job of rendering them into English, though the verbal puzzles that Vladimir devised for Véra are untranslatable.

Vladimir repeatedly complains about sending more letters to Véra than he receives from her. A letter addressed to “Pussykins” at a hotel in the Schwarzwald on June 18, 1926, begins: “You write disgustingly rarely to me.” On July 2, 1926, he chides Véra: “Had we published a little book — a collection of your letters and mine — there would have been no more than 20% of your share, my love. ... I advise you to catch up — there’s still time.”

However, these letters were not written for publication or posterity. Nabokov was an extraordinary man of letters, but the letters he sent to Véra are valuable for biographical information rather than literary merit. Unlike Henry James and John Keats, he used letters less as a stage for bravura performances than to convey quotidian information — a weather report, the dinner menu, the state of his finances, the names of opponents in tennis. The letters occasionally mention fiction and poetry he is working on, but they lack shop talk illuminating the writing process.

Vladimir occasionally mentions books he is reading, but without the pungent analysis that enlivens his posthumously published Lectures on Literature. His assessment of “Madame Bovary” as “the most brilliant novel in world literature” is explained only by its “perfect harmony between content and form” and the fact that it is “the only book which, in three places, makes me feel hot under my eyeballs.”

Though Nabokov proclaims to Véra that “I am becoming more and more firmly convinced that art is the only thing that matters in life,” his letters are preoccupied with other matters. With scholarly apparatus including chronology, bibliography and 186 pages of endnotes, this hefty edition shadows the young author but sheds little light on his art.